The NY Times has a piece in today’s paper entitled “Journalism Rules Are Bent in News Coverage from Iran.”  The piece questions the accuracy of news reporting on recent events in Iran that is based on “anonymous Twitter messages”, blogging and “unverified videos.”  The Times piece calls this type of reporting evidence of a “publish first, ask questions later” approach to journalism.

I think it’s absolutely fair for the Times to ask questions about the sources for news coming out of Iran, but I also think they’re incorrectly suggesting that the axiom “check the source” especially applies to reports associated with new media.  Let’s not forget the Times’ failure to consider the source when it uncritically published reports by Judith Miller and others that accepted at face value the Bush administration’s misinformation about WMD in Iraq The Times ultimately conceded that its coverage of the buildup to the war in Iraq was “not as rigorous as it should have been.”  It admitted that reporting had often depended on “Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on regime change in Iraq” whose credibility “c[a]me under increasing public debate.”  That’s putting it mildly.

I think it’s a great idea for the Times and others across the media spectrum to be skeptical, to ask questions, to consider and check the source when it comes to recent events in Iran.  I just hope that this scrutiny is not limited only to reporting that involves new media and is not limited to recent events in Iran .

As usual:

This won’t come as the slightest surprise to those versed in health care policy issues. But I fear it’s only barely permeated the health care reform debate in the country, certainly in Washington. And that’s this: the opposition to a so-called ‘public option’ comes almost entirely from insurance companies who have developed monopolies or near monopolies in particular geographic areas. And they don’t want competition.

Note, I’m not saying more competition. I’m saying any competition at all. As Zack Roth explains in this new piece 94% of the health care insurance market is now under monopoly or near-monopoly conditions — the official term of art is ‘highly concentrated’. In other words, there’s no mystery why insurance costs keep going up even as the suck quotient rises precipitously. Because in most areas there’s little or no actual competition.

That’s exactly right. As President Obama pointed out last week, the arguments used by the industry and by conservatives are illogical at best and dishonest at worst:

If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care; if they tell us that they’re offering a good deal, then why is it that the government, which they say can’t run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That’s not logical.

They’re not against the public plan because it would be bad for you and me, they just don’t want the competition. Pretty self-serving, no?

(also posted at the NOW! blog)

“The Lord sent Prophet Nathan to King David. When he came to him, he said, ‘There were two men in a certain town, one rich and the other poor.  The rich man had a very large number of sheep and cattle, but the poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb he had bought. He raised it, and it grew up with him and his children. It shared his food, drank from his cup and even slept in his arms. It was like a daughter to him.

Now a traveler came to the rich man, but the rich man refrained from taking one of his own sheep or cattle to prepare a meal for the traveler who had come to him. Instead, he took the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man and prepared it for the one who had come to him.’”

King David burned with anger against the man and said to Nathan, ‘As surely as the Lord lives, the man who did this deserves to die! He must pay for that lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and had no pity.’

Then Prophet Nathan said to King David, ‘You are the man!’”

President Obama spoke at the annual Radio and TV Correspondents Dinner on June 19th.  Here are a couple of his timely quips.

“Nick at Nite has a new take on an old classic, “Leave it to Uigurs. I thought that was pretty good.”

“But I have to say, as I traveled to all these countries, I saw firsthand how much people truly have in common with one another. Because no matter where I went, there’s one thing I heard over and over again from every world leader:  “No thanks, but have you considered Palau?”

Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor are two of my stylistic and rhetorical gurus.  I am given to satirical and politically incorrect humor.  Yet, something about my President’s jokes on these matters, at this time in our history, sounds off key.  This scene reminds me of the Prophet Nathan’s cunning parable that indicted King David.  It is one thing for Leno, Letterman, or Stewart to satirize the Uighurs plight, but for the President who holds their destiny in his hands to do so seems indecent.

The 17 Chinese Muslim ethnic Uighurs in Obama’s joke have been held at the Guantanamo Bay Prison for more than seven years without charge.  They were cleared for release from Guantanamo four years ago after US officials ruled there was no evidence to hold them as “enemy combatants.”

Last year a Federal judge ordered the men released into the United States, but an appeals court halted the order, and they have been in legal limbo ever since.

The US state department has said the Uighurs cannot be returned to China because of fears they will face persecution and possible execution.

Officials in Palau, a U.S. administered territory until 1994, have agreed to temporarily take in the 17 Uighurs for humanitarian reasons.  The island is heavily dependent on U.S. aid.  Plus, Palau maintains diplomatic relations with Taiwan, not China.  Ironically, Palau and the United States are discussing the possibility of a $200-million aid package.

Here’s what gets my little lamb, I mean, goat.

From my back porch, Obama’s cavalier joking is part of a larger American soul affliction.  We live such comfy, entitled lives that wise cracks about locking up marginalized Chinese guys for years on end without cause, is like watching a movie.  Admitting they are completely innocent, yet holding them in prison for their own “protection” is like playing a video game.  Dealing them for money to a helpless former island territory is like the Washington Redskins trading a football player.  Reporters, known in days of yore as political watchdogs, making jolly with the President about our human rights abuses is like attending a farcical play.

Maybe I got up today on the self - righteous side of the bed.  But, Prophet Nathan’s confrontational exclamation seems on the money.

America, “You are the man!”

Just so we’re clear, we know Republicans aren’t going to vote for health reform that actually does anything right?

Via the New York Times:

Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader, said he was unaware of any House Republican inclined to support the Democrats’ proposed legislation.

Asked how many Senate Republicans could sign on to developing Democratic plans, Senator Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, author of a Republican alternative, said: “I think right now, none. Zero.”

So, the question becomes, how far are you willing to push this “bipartisanship” thing? Will you go for bipartisanship at the expense of getting a bill that does what President Obama and the American people want it to do - lower costs, make health care affordable, and increase coverage?

Because it’s possible to get, say, one or two Republican votes in the Senate, but that might not even be enough to satisfy Republicans:

Hoping to lessen the divide, a handful of senators from the two parties who sit on the Finance Committee have been meeting privately, trying to find some consensus. But they left for the weeklong Fourth of July recess without any firm agreement, though they pledged to keep trying. Even a senator at the center of those talks among four Republicans and three Democrats, Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the committee, indicated a reluctance to back any legislation unless it was constructed to attract more than a handful of Republicans.

“This is not going to be a bipartisan bill with just three or four Republicans,” Mr. Grassley said. “This is a bill that gets broad bipartisan support or it is not going to be a bipartisan bill.”

Now you tell me: What kind of bill do you think more than a few Republican Senators would vote for? Do you think it would do any good? Do you think it would be anything but the status quo? Do you think it would lower your costs instead of bailing out the insurance industry with taxpayer dollars?

If I had to guess, any bill Senate Republicans support would do nothing for the American people. The health care crisis is too great - bipartisanship isn’t worth the price we’d pay.

(also posted at the NOW! blog)

Urban legend prevails in the wingnut realm. The Census is a very feared bugaboo, and declarations by head nutcase Bachman that she will not obey our laws and give the information it requires for government logic are providing fodder for the mills of the survivalists.

Seen as an evil plot, like chlorination, the census struggles on trying to represent our actual composition as a country. In Mother Jones, a conversation on the freakish views that keep people hiding from giving their information covers the issue nicely.

MJ: Do you think the Census Bureau has been damaged by partisan activity?

KP: It’s a complicated question because the partisan activity goes back to 1790. [Laughs.] The first presidential veto, by George Washington, was a veto of Alexander Hamilton’s formula for apportioning the House, and the one that Washington preferred was one that Thomas Jefferson produced, and that was one partisan issue. The apportionment formula that Jefferson produced gave an extra seat to Virginia. Everybody knew what that game was. [Laughs.] Look, partisan interest in the census is simply nothing new. Has there been damage over that period? Yes, on and off.

I think the sampling fight, whatever it was, was deeply unfortunate. The actual assertion that the Census Bureau could behave in such a way as to tilt things one way or the other way in the partisan sense, is, on the face of it, a silly charge. It’s the same Census Bureau that’s considered to be incompetent by some people, and then some of the same people are saying that this incompetent agency is so clever and so Machiavellian that it can design a census for partisan reasons. It just doesn’t compute. Now, did [accusations of partisanship] damage the census? Yes, it damaged the idea of sampling. I like to tell the people I interact with who are against sampling, “Next time you want to go to the doctor for a blood test, don’t say, ‘I want you to take out a little bit,’ say, ‘Take out all of it!’” How else will you know? When you wake up in the morning and you want to find out whether it’s raining, you don’t look out every window of your house; you look out one window. There: You sampled. So the idea that we turned the word “sampling” into a dirty word is deeply, deeply damaging, not to the Census Bureau, but the idea of fiscal integrity. Every other number we use to govern society—unemployment numbers, trade statistics, health care, how many people are uninsured—all of those numbers are based on samples.
(snip)
The whole foreclosure crisis is a major crisis because whole hunks of the country are empty when they should be functioning neighborhoods. There are just a host of problems. And then there are the ones we can’t predict. Who knows? Natural disasters, strikes, I can’t tell you what’s going to happen. I know it’s going to be difficult; it’s always difficult to do a serious census, especially with today’s economic, political, and general cultural circumstances. Let me ask you a question. Let’s say there are 12 million undocumented immigrants in this country. What percentage of those people do you think will mail a questionnaire back in?

MJ: Ten?

KP: Whatever it is, it’s a low number.

The numbers the government uses to allocate funds are going to be skewed in favor of the stable households, rather than those needing funds more desperately. This is not a help.

The wingnuts are making a hurdle against fair distribution. No surprise there. Increasingly, those who have already suffered from their empowered ideology are scheduled to be hit yet again.

Hopefully there will be responsible reporting on the facts, but more likely, the loudest voices with the most spectacular nonsense will get the attention. From covering the freak show, our pundits increasingly have become part of it. The country is learning the hard way that it is ill served by media babble.

(This post also at http://cabdrollery.blogspot.com/ )

Watch this:

Here’s the aftermath, via Nico Pitney at the Huffington Post:

The only thing that surprised me was when Dana turned to me after our initial sparring and called me a “dick” in a whispered tone (the specific phrase was, I believe, “You’re such a dick”). Howie Kurtz wrote on Twitter that he didn’t hear it, which is understandable — he was doing the lead-in for the next part of the segment on the ABC White House special. But it happened (I urge Howie to watch the video of the panel during the ABC intro) and it was frankly pretty odd.

That’s right, Dana Milbank - Iraq war cheerleader, Obama swimsuit questioner, beltway press douchebag - got a bit jealous and got smacked down. Maybe people like Dana is why old-media journalism is dying. I certainly wouldn’t pay to read this guy.

After the many times I’ve featured the ignorance of WaPo editorials, may I point out that it’s just useless to point out that they’re clueless, then continue giving them hits. As a parting gesture to any pretense of dignity, WaPo has fired their redeeming feature, Dan Froomkin. The voice of reason lies bleeding and dead there, and I will not be going there to give them proof of readership anymore.

Many of the rational voices I visit are in accord. The editors at WaPo create dissent by their rampant nonsense but when readers comment - usually giving real information that WaPo ignores - the editors count it as ‘popularity’. I am joining the departing horde and recommend you do the same.

…there was also sadness this week, and I’m not talking about the deaths of entertainment icons from the 1970s. I am talking about the WashingtonPost.com website, which has booted out one of the best bloggers on the web.

Dan Froomkin’s “White House Watch” column today will be the last one that appears on WashingtonPost.com. Froomkin has expressed interest in possibly moving the column elsewhere and continuing it, and I consider this a test of whether newspapers are (a.) smart enough to realize this is the way to modernize and move into the future of journalism, or (b.) dumb as a bag of hammers. WashingtonPost.com has obviously chosen the (b.) route. Because Froomkin’s column is a shining example of how newspapers could migrate from their print business model to the more interactive web-based model they need to be in to survive.

Froomkin was fired, it was announced, because his “ratings” had dropped after Obama was elected. This is utter hogwash. In the first place, his column “White House Watch” (it started as “White House Briefing” but was changed later) was dedicated to putting the executive branch under a microscope and reporting what was there. Of course, the Bush White House was more fertile ground for this, especially towards the end. But Froomkin did not back off from examining Obama’s White House, and has been severely critical of Obama’s decisions on secrecy and openness and torture and accountability.

The real reason his numbers dropped is that the editors stopped putting a link to his column on their front page. When Froomkin got progressively harder and harder to find, fewer and fewer people found him. In other words, his ratings dropped because they didn’t feature him as prominently anymore. This is the new online reality — your hit count depends on a link on the front page of the site. The more prominent, the higher your hitcount will be.

But dark suspicions have been raised (mostly by his loyal readers) that Froomkin was fired because he dared to contradict one of the very conservative op-ed writers on the Washington Post payroll (the two entities, Washington Post and WashingtonPost.com are supposedly “separate,” I should mention). The Washington Post has become a safe haven for such ultra-conservative commentators (they not only have an ex-Bush speechwriter, but they also hired William Kristol after the New York Times got tired of him being so wrong so often). So, in keeping with this conservative bent, Froomkin had to go.

This is pathetic and is an outrage. Anyone who agrees should contact the ombudsman at: ombudsman@washpost.com and let him know how you feel. [I disagree - Ruth]

What is truly pathetic is that the newspaper which a few decades ago brought down an American president is now not even worth reading anymore, because the only thing in it that isn’t the equivalent of Fox News is their cartoonist Tom Toles (who is excellent). A bastion of journalism has, quite literally (at least for me) been reduced to a cartoon. Pathetic.

Let’s see… bring down a government, sell lots of newspapers… pack the staff with neo-cons in possibly the most liberal city in America, get ready for bankruptcy. No wonder newspapers are in such trouble, if this is the way they plan their business models. (Emphasis added.)

Pathetic is one description for bringing down what used to be a heroic voice for justice, and for digging out the truth as a newspaper is supposed to do. The glory days at WaPo have been brought down, to the use of those actively destroying functional government. Deregulation has been enthroned where public interests used to reign.

This is radical overthrow of the truth, and my response is to leave.

No more hits for WaPo.

[You can see the dreadful effect of major media promoting false information by the idiotic quality of some of the winger comments sliming here.]

(This post also at http://cabdrollery.blogspot.com/ )

The House passed the Waxman-Markey energy bill last night.

There’s a lot of dicussion in the progressive community about whether this bill was indeed worth passing. My personal view is a bit split. On the one hand, the Senate is still a large hurdle that needs to be cleared, and this bill in its current form might not actually do much for our energy and climate problems. On the other, when it’s this late in the game, you’ve lost most of your ability to affect the outcome anyway, so might as well pass it.

But I’m curious to know what others think. Care to weigh in?

While it is diverting to listen to born-again fiscally responsible wingnuts piping up on the floor of the House to insist social programs are going to break the bank, it’s actually happening among the leaders. Working its way through obscure official channels rather than in the dog and pony shows the freakish right wing keeps throwing, Pay-Go legislation is being put in place to give actual underpinnings to our national government.

After the ‘throw money at rich folks’ approach the wingers employed over eight years in total power over spending, this works back toward sound finances. Soundness is much needed, as those burned by our catastrophic behavior in world finance are beginning to look at replacing the almighty dollar with a currency not subject to winger whimsy.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers grilled White House Budget Director Peter Orszag at a hearing Thursday over the administration’s flexibility on a new pay-as-you-go law that would allow for trillions of dollars in exemptions.

The administration is asking lawmakers to pass legislation that would require any new federal program to be paid for either by cutting spending or raising taxes. But the White House has agreed to exempt a few big-ticket items that have added to the nation’s budget deficit.

During the House Budget Committee hearing, Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.) noted the exemptions will cost more than $3 trillion over 10 years. Policies that won’t be subject to pay-go restrictions under Obama’s bill include the extension of middle-class tax cuts enacted during the Bush administration, funds to keep the Alternative Minimum Tax from hitting middle-income Americans and Medicare payments to physicians.

“If we don’t extend a number of these [exemptions], we could see an increase in the reduction of the deficit,” said Becerra, the vice chairman of the House Democratic Caucus.

Orszag said items were exempted because neither lawmakers nor the White House have come up with ways to pay for them. Those policies also have broad support from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress.

But Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) suggested lawmakers consider letting more of the tax cuts, championed by President George W. Bush, expire, and not just the ones for those Americans making more than $200,000.
(snip)
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), who has called on the House to take up the bill in July, said the pay-go law is necessary to stem the increase in debt.

“By reducing the amount of money spent on interest payments on the debt, we will be better able to make investments in areas that make our economy strong, such as healthcare, energy and education,” he said.

The measure has less support in the Senate; though Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has backed it, Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), whose Senate Budget Committee would mark up any pay-go bill, has criticized the measure for exempting expensive items.

But Hoyer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) have pledged not to consider any new tax bills from the Senate unless the upper chamber takes up pay-go legislation. The House leaders’ pay-go promise came in response to the $3.6 trillion budget resolution, which called for discretionary spending levels higher than Blue Dog Democrats wanted.

Reality won’t get much attention in the media, but reality bites when the actual practice is profligacy. Returning to sound finances is overdue. When our society suffers real losses as it has in school spending, infrastructure, and collapse of our health system, we are required to get hold of the process of spending again.

The slow, steady progress of return to sanity is being accomplished by leadership while the opposition scurries about trying to light the fires faster than they can be put out.

(This post also at http://cabdrollery.blogspot.com/ )

Yesterday was amazing.

10,000 people from just about every state in the Union came to DC. People came from all walks of life - pastors, bricklayers, restaurant workers, small business owners, actors and actresses, doctors, nurses - and they gave their legislators a clear message - we want health reform, we want health reform that’s real (including a strong public health insurance option, we want health reform that will lower costs, and we want it now, in 2009, because we can’t wait.

As someone who spent all day walking through the crowd and taking in the event, it was impressive. Not only the numbers - 10,000+ in Upper Senate Park was more than the Capitol Police had ever seen - but the lineup was, shall we say, star-studded. Howard Dean, Anna Berger, Senators Schumer and Brown, Congresswoman Allison Schwartz, many other Members of Congress, and our celebrity special guest, actress Edie Falco. They spoke along with grassroots supporters who shared their stories.

But the rally wasn’t the only event yesterday. It wasn’t even the main event. Twenty town halls were scheduled, with dozens of Members of Congress attending to hear directly from their constituents about health care. And on top of that, hundreds of people met with their legislators one-on-one in small lobbying visits, further driving home the message.

The question looms, however: Did we make a difference? I say unequivocally, yes.

The reports are still rolling in from the visits people had with their Members of Congress, but Health Care for America Now has already advanced our campaign significantly. Senator Burris and Representatives Lipiniski and Rush are the newest Members of Congress to sign on to our statement of principles. And in perhaps the biggest news of the day, Senator Arlen Specter endorsed the Schumer proposal for a public health insurance option, a proposal completely consistent with our principles.

So not only did people come to DC and talk about health care, but Congress listened. That to me says this event was worth it.

We’ve got a long fight ahead of us, and it won’t always be all good news, but things are moving, and we’re going to win, because we can’t wait.

See below for photos from the event:

(also posted at the NOW! blog)